I thought it was weird when I came home at 2 AM Sunday night, and my dog didn’t stir or even make a peep from upstairs. No matter what time of night I come home or how quiet I am, Mowgli is always right by the front door barking and howling before I even step foot on my stoop.
Then, when it was late Monday night and my dad and Jeanne had yet to come home from work, I knew something was wrong. I called Jeanne, who answered the phone in tears.
My heart dropped. My family is in the thickest of mud that it’s been in in a long time, both on my side and that of my stepmom and stepsiblings. There were a million different thoughts that sprinted through my head all at once, but my dog being sick wasn’t one of them. I demanded Jeanne tell me what was going on.
“Mowgli has cancer,” she said.
For a moment I’ll admit I was relieved that it wasn’t one of the scenarios I imagined it to be. I was thinking the worst, and that’s when Jeanne said, “We’re trying right now to decide what to do with her.”
Then all I could think of was how mean I was to Mowgli on Sunday, telling her to shut up and stop barking every five seconds because I needed to concentrate on my homework (yes, I’m taking some classes). Anyone who’s met my dog knows that her bark is quite possibly the most obnoxious bark in the world. It’s piercing and loud and sounds like someone who is terribly tone deaf or drastically off pitch trying to sing a note that only Mariah Carey could hit; mowgli’s bark breaks sound barriers.
My dog’s eye had developed a small infection, so my dad and Jeanne brought her to the vet on Monday.
“She spent way too much time feeling under the dog’s stomach,” Jeanne told me. “I knew something was wrong.” (Later, Jeanne came downstairs hysterically laughing and admitting that while the vet was feeling around Mowgli’s stomach, Jeanne said, ‘Mowgli loves socks, but she doesn’t eat them!’, to which the vet had an incredibly confused reaction.)
The vet found a tumor and X-rays showed that it stretches through the whole right side of Mowgli’s body. She’s a 4-year-old labradoodle, so it came as a bit of a surprise. I imagined her sitting there, people talking about her and her life, without any idea of what’s going on. There’s obviously no way to explain stuff like this to a dog, yet I wonder if animals somehow do understand.
Mowgli is in surgery today to get the tumor removed so the vets can perform a biopsy. I’m not normally one of those gushy pet owners that talks in a baby voice to my dog, but my heart is definitely hurting and hoping for the best.
Fingers crossed that all goes well and she’ll be a healthy little pup after some recovery time.
